Controlling a web page from Labview

Question

Hello,
I am trying to acquire image from an Encoder's IP address, but I'm facing some problems:
1. Once the Ip address is loaded, the web page asks for authentication (user and password), so I don't know how I can send this information to IE through Labview.
2. Once one has logged in, the web page shows a window with ActiveX controls in which the image from a camera is acquired and can be zoomed in and out, or saved. I need to saved the image, so I would need to send an instruction to the page as if I had clicked in the "Save" icon. I wonder if I can send some sort of instructions telling "buttonX=ON" or using the coordinates in the window to simulate a click or sth.
I tried the "AutoIT Example.vi" and changed it to call internet explorer and then sending the URL, and I also tried the "open_browser_send_URL.vi" but as I said, I'm stuck in the authentication part.
I would greatly appreciate any suggestions you may have to deal with this problem.
Thanks
Solved!
Go to Solution.
Attachments:
open_browser_send_url.vi ‏25 KB

Answer 1

When you attempt to log in to the web page, does it use a form on the web page, or does it pop up a separate authentication dialog?  If it's a form within the web page, you may be able to do this using Internet Explorer and LabVIEW.  The details will depend on your web page - if it uses a form submit then it should work, if it relies on Javascript then it may be more trouble.  You'll have to look at the web page source to identify the correct form elements.  I'm attaching a VI that demonstrates how I handled this in one previous project.  The VI expects that you'll pass in a reference to a WebBrowser object.
To save the image, you may again be able to dig into the HTML source of the web page to find out what method of the ActiveX object is being called.  You can then obtain a reference to that ActiveX object, cast it to the appropriate type, and call that same method from your VI.  I've done this before for a web-based label-printing application, as shown in the attached image.  In this case the ActiveX component is called TidAx1 (which I found from looking at the source of the web page).  After obtaining a reference to the ActiveX component within the web page, the LabVIEW programmer has access to all its properties and methods.
Mauro Vera wrote:
I attach some links below, guidelines that can be made. Any questions please contact us.
Sometimes it's really hard to know if you NI people (so I'm assuming, from the blue username) actually read the questions before you attempt to answer them... why would you attach links about sending email when the poster asked about reading data from a web page?
Attachments:
web login.vi ‏26 KB
go to URL.vi ‏12 KB
set html form element value.vi ‏11 KB